Poet As Fisherman

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1. THE FISHERMAN THE waters rush’d, the waters rose, A fisherman sat by, While on his line in calm repose He cast his patient eye. And as he sat, and hearken’d there, The flood was cleft in twain, And, lo! a dripping mermaid fair Sprang from the troubled main. She sang to him, and spake the while: “Why […]...
2. Pretty Words Poets make pets of pretty, docile words: I love smooth words, like gold-enamelled fish Which circle slowly with a silken swish, And tender ones, like downy-feathred birds: Words shy and dappled, deep-eyed deer in herds, Come to my hand, and playful if I wish, Or purring softly at a silver dish, Blue Persian kittens fed […]...
3. The Drunken Fisherman Wallowing in this bloody sty, I cast for fish that pleased my eye (Truly Jehovah’s bow suspends No pots of gold to weight its ends); Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout Rose to my bait. They flopped about My canvas creel until the moth Corrupted its unstable cloth. A calendar to tell the day; A handkerchief […]...
4. The Meditation Of The Old Fisherman You waves, though you dance by my feet like children at play, Though you glow and you glance, though you purr and you dart; In the Junes that were warmer than these are, the waves were more gay, When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart. The herring are not in […]...
5. Womanly Qualms When I go rowing on the lake, I long to be a man; I’ll give my Sunday frock to have A callous heart like Dan. I love the ripple of the waves When gliding o’er the deep, But when I see the cruel ours, I close my eyes and weep; For there are cat-fish in […]...
6. Said The Poet To The Analyst My business is words. Words are like labels, Or coins, or better, like swarming bees. I confess I am only broken by the sources of things; As if words were counted like dead bees in the attic, Unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings. I must always forget who one words is able […]...
7. To a Poet There is a lovely noise about your name, Above the shoutings of the city clear, More than a moment’s merriment, whose claim Will greater grow with every mellowed year. The people will not bear you down the street, Dancing to the strong rhythm of your words, The modern kings will throttle you to greet The […]...
8. In Memoriam Paul Celan Lay these words into the dead man’s grave Next to the almonds and black cherries – Tiny skulls and flowering blood-drops, eyes, And Thou, O bitterness that pillows his head. Lay these words on the dead man’s eyelids Like eyebrights, like medieval trumpet flowers That will flourish, this time, in the shade. Let the beheaded […]...
9. Yes, the Fish Music A trout-colored wind blows Through my eyes, through my fingers, And I remember how the trout Used to hide from the dinosaurs When they came to drink at the river. The trout hid in subways, castles, And automobiles. They waited patiently for the dinosaurs to go away....
10. Fisherman jim's kids Fisherman Jim lived on the hill With his bonnie wife an’ his little boys; ‘T wuz “Blow, ye winds, as blow ye will – Naught we reck of your cold and noise!” For happy and warm were he an’ his, And he dandled his kids upon his knee To the song of the sea. Fisherman […]...
11. Silver Slowly, silently, now the moon Walks the night in her silver shoon; This way, and that, she peers, and sees Silver fruit upon silver trees; One by one the casements catch Her beams beneath the silvery thatch; Couched in his kennel, like a log, With paws of silver sleeps the dog; From their shadowy cote […]...
12. What We Are What we are? We say we want to become What we are or what we have an intent to be. We read the possibilities, or try. We get to some. We think we know how to read. We recognize a word, here and there, A syllable: male, it says perhaps, Or female, talent look what […]...
13. John Rouat the Fisherman Margaret Simpson was the daughter of humble parents in the county of Ayr, With a comely figure, and face of beauty rare, And just in the full bloom of her womanhood, Was united to John Rouat, a fisherman good. John’s fortune consisted of his coble, three oars, and his fishing-gear, Besides his two stout boys, […]...
14. THE PEARL FISHERMAN This evening and part of the night I sank again into the dense sea Where we beings and things float. I descended for pearls to show to men Who fear even the risk of the border. This evening and part of the night I was amidst that silence, in that deepness Where the most infinite […]...
15. Ad Piscatorem FOR these are sacred fishes all Who know that lord that is the lord of all; Come to the brim and nose the friendly hand That sways and can beshadow all the land. Nor only so, but have their names, and come When they are summoned by the Lord of Rome. Here once his line […]...
16. Schroeder the Fisherman I sat on the bank above Bernadotte And dropped crumbs in the water, Just to see the minnows bump each other, Until the strongest got the prize. Or I went to my little pasture, Where the peaceful swine were asleep in the wallow, Or nosing each other lovingly, And emptied a basket of yellow corn, […]...
17. Pavement Poet God’s truth! these be the bitter times. In vain I sing my sheaf of rhymes, And hold my battered hat for dimes. And then a copper collars me, Barking: “It’s begging that you be; Come on, dad; you’re in custody.” And then the Beak looks down and says: “Sheer doggerel I deem your lays: I […]...
18. The Fisherman Although I can see him still. The freckled man who goes To a grey place on a hill In grey Connemara clothes At dawn to cast his flies, It’s long since I began To call up to the eyes This wise and simple man. All day I’d looked in the face What I had hoped […]...
19. The Poet's Thought It came to him in rainbow dreams, Blent with the wisdom of the sages, Of spirit and of passion born; In words as lucent as the morn He prisoned it, and now it gleams A jewel shining through the ages....
20. Night Stuff LISTEN a while, the moon is a lovely woman, a lonely woman, lost in a silver dress, lost in a circus rider’s silver dress. Listen a while, the lake by night is a lonely woman, a lovely woman, circled with birches and pines mixing their green and white among stars shattered in spray clear nights. […]...
21. Theodore the Poet As a boy, Theodore, you sat for long hours On the shore of the turbid Spoon With deep-set eye staring at the door of the crawfish’s burrow, Waiting for him to appear, pushing ahead, First his waving antennae, like straws of hay, And soon his body, colored like soap-stone, Gemmed with eyes of jet. And […]...
22. Critic and Poet: an Epilogue No man had ever heard a nightingale, When once a keen-eyed naturalist was stirred To study and define what is a bird, To classify by rote and book, nor fail To mark its structure and to note the scale Whereon its song might possibly be heard. Thus far, no farther; so he spake the word. […]...
23. Dead poet I’m sure it would be easier to survive as a dead poet, I mean it in the surmise that I won’t be tempted To revise or rewrite the poem I wrote last night, or the Poems I wrote last week (which make me cringe when I Read them again), or when I read poetry of […]...
24. You Begin You begin this way: This is your hand, This is your eye, This is a fish, blue and flat On the paper, almost The shape of an eye This is your mouth, this is an O Or a moon, whichever You like. This is yellow. Outside the window Is the rain, green Because it is […]...
25. The Poet in the Nursery The youngest poet down the shelves was fumbling In a dim library, just behind the chair From which the ancient poet was mum-mumbling A song about some Lovers at a Fair, Pulling his long white beard and gently grumbling That rhymes were beastly things and never there. And as I groped, the whole time I […]...
26. Poet's Household 1 The stout poet tiptoes On the lawn. Surprisingly limber In his thick sweater Like a middle-age burglar. Is the young robin injured? 2 She bends to feed the geese Revealing the neck’s white curve Below her curled hair. Her husband seems not to watch, But she shimmers in his poem. 3 A hush is […]...
27. The power of the Lake The power of the Lake lingers still So many years beyond its fascination Ending; it was there in the beginning, An unveiling of towering sensitivities, A flowering of gentle obsession. The town that grew in the lee Of the Lake expressed the same Thoughts although hard head bastards Bartered and fought for land, Trying to […]...
28. A Wreath To The Fish Who is this fish, still wearing its wealth, Flat on my drainboard, dead asleep, Its suit of mail proof only against the stream? What is it to live in a stream, To dwell forever in a tunnel of cold, Never to leave your shining birthsuit, Never to spend your inheritance of thin coins? And who […]...
29. Poet's Path My garden hath a slender path With ivy overgrown, A secret place where once would pace A pot all alone; I see him now with fretted brow, Plunged deep in thought; And sometimes he would write maybe, And sometimes he would not. A verse a day he used to say Keeps worry from the door; […]...
30. The Proud Poet (For Shaemas O Sheel) One winter night a Devil came and sat upon my bed, His eyes were full of laughter for his heart was full of crime. “Why don’t you take up fancy work, or embroidery?” he said, “For a needle is as manly a tool as a pen that makes a rhyme!” “You […]...
31. The Poet Words flow onto paper like rain, forming giant rivers Of unseen lands. The very force guides us along a journey That holds of great adventure. We are the explorers of the literary world. We must find the courage to write what Others are unable to, with the greatest Of passion. A poet dreams. and then […]...
32. Lines Draw a line. Write a line. There. Stay in line, hold the line, a glance Between the lines is fine but don’t Turn corners, cross, cut in, go over Or out, between two points of no Return’s a line of flight, between Two points of view’s a line of vision. But a line of thought […]...
33. Sea horn within the shell swim all the sea’s fish Our ears too are compendiums of sound The big bang exploded – such a long wish Waves and warps towards the present ground Shell to ear – each breeds the other’s cry Infinity in slices sluiced in words Haunting the future in us till we die And […]...
34. Kicks The fishermen on Lake Michigan, sometimes, For kicks, they spit two hunks of bait on hooks At either end of a single length of line And toss that up among the scavenging gulls, Who go for it so fast that often two of them Make the connection before it hits the water. Hooked and hung […]...
35. Flounder Here, she said, put this on your head. She handed me a hat. You ’bout as white as your dad, And you gone stay like that. Aunt Sugar rolled her nylons down Around each bony ankle, And I rolled down my white knee socks Letting my thin legs dangle, Circling them just above water And […]...
36. Underwater Autumn Now the summer perch flips twice and glides A lateral fathom at the first cold rain, The surface near to silver from a frosty hill. Along the weed and grain of log he slides his tail. Nervously the trout (his stream-toned heart Locked in the lake, his poise and nerve disgraced) Above the stirring catfish, […]...
37. Affirmation To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, We glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads When a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer Pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage, That began without harm, scatters Into debris on the shore, And a […]...
38. The Poet's Forge He lies on his back, the idling smith, A lazy, dreaming fellow is he; The sky is blue, or the sky is gray, He lies on his back the livelong day, Not a tool in sight, say what they may, A curious sort of smith is he. The powers of the air are in league […]...
39. Sex With A Famous Poet I had sex with a famous poet last night And when I rolled over and found myself beside him I shuddered Because I was married to someone else, Because I wasn’t supposed to have been drinking, Because I was in fancy hotel room I didn’t recognize. I would have told you Right off this was […]...
40. 56. Epistle to Davie, A Brother Poet WHILE winds frae aff Ben-Lomond blaw, An’ bar the doors wi’ driving snaw, An’ hing us owre the ingle, I set me down to pass the time, An’ spin a verse or twa o’ rhyme, In hamely, westlin jingle. While frosty winds blaw in the drift, Ben to the chimla lug, I grudge a wee […]...